Christmas Eve

Here we are - Christmas Eve and still no offers of Panto.  Ah, it's been years since I cracked that old gag on here, (I believe it is copyright Spike Milligan circa 1959).  But it is, indeed, Christmas Eve and I'm sat here contemplating whether or not to venture out for a drink with friends.  On the plus side, if I do it will be the first time in years I'll have been arsed to go out on Christmas Eve.  On the debit side, that bloody cough without a cold is still doing its damnedest to ruin my Christmas.  There really is no reason for it to still be around - all the other symptoms have well and truly gone.  Whatever I end up doing, it's been a pretty decent Christmas Eve already - The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn was on TV this afternoon and made an excellent accompaniment to my sausage roll baking.  I still maintain that it is the greatest Robin Hood movie ever made and that if Robin Hood did exist, we can only hope that he was like Errol Flynn.

I also caught the end of It's a Wonderful Life, (a film I recently overheard someone at work describe as 'crap', which, I think, says more about their emotional vacuity than it does about the merits of Capra's classic), which I hadn't seen in years.  For fuck's sake!  I've just had to waste ten minutes getting back on line after some idiot phoned me, knocking the router out in the process, this despite the fact that I had earlier asked said individual not to call me on the landline because of the aforementioned fault which BT seem either incapable or simply unwilling to fix.  Speaking of which, I've been forced to agree to a pointless engineer's visit on Monday as BT remain obsessed with ignoring the facts and instead trying to prove that my 'equipment' is at fault.  This, despite them agreeing that if the problem persists when using the test socket, this shows the problem lies outside the property.  But, they desperately add, our line test shows no fault, so it must be at your end (even though the aforementioned tests of their own devising show otherwise).  Obviously, there's no fault shown on the line because it isn't a line fault - line faults can't produce these symptoms, nor can defective equipment, only an exchange fault can.  But I've wasted far too much time on those clowns for now.  It only remains to wish everyone a Happy Winterval.